Le Guerre

Question to General (Five Star) mantis: You seem to have given much consideration to the war which has taken place on the sisterworlds of Sainte Croix-Saint Anne. I still say the Nine-Eight-Six was a penal colony ship, but will honor your more obviously militaristic background when you argue it was merely following a series of war-mongering bellacitous first-strikers. You're the one with the purple heart, after all (whereas mine is pacemaker-driven) and I don't need guns now that I have Viagra. Perhaps, as a scholar of interplanetary war (I hear you were ASTEROIDS champ in 6th grade), you'd care to comment on any of the following: Do you attach any significance to the antebellum occupational forces on Sainte Anne excluding the defeated French from helping to form a new regime, but the same a.o.f. on Sainte Croix allowing it? Specifically, what does this tell us about the war's victors--have Sainte Anne and Sainte Croix been divied up like Berlin by some sort of interplanetary Allies/UN conquering nexus? Or might, say, something like the Vichy Resistance been operational on Sainte Croix, helping to undermine the other French Croixians? You see, I'm trying to account for some reason the sisterworlds were allowed to develop differently once they were defeated--especially since everything we're led to believe from Annese accounts the victors in the war were simply English and not the Barsoomian Allied Megaspace Command. I'm counting on you to fill me in, of course. Don't disappoint me, Little General. Saluting respecfully, Pfc. Robert Borski

Robert, Re: the French/English war aftermath. I'm guessing: (1) The French (or pseudo-French) initially colonized St. Croix because St. Anne already had people on it (abos). (2) As a result, St. Croix became the "urban" planet and St. Anne became the "rural" planet. The majority of the French population lived on St. Croix. (3) Thus after the war, the new owners of the urban planet needed "collaboration" with the previous regime to win the peace and secure the transition. The few French farmers on rural planet owed their alligence to the French on St. Croix, so they were covered with the same blanket of collaboration, and St. Anne is merely flooded with penal colonists to secure its empty lands with people. (In fact, do we have evidence that St. Croix got a lot of settlers from Mrs. B's ship? If they had a semi-military mission, maybe it was to build a base on St. Anne from which military strikes against sisterworld could be launched? A sort of "Airstrip One" plan.) (4) Text tells us that because there was such a labor crisis on St. Croix after the war, slavery was introduced (just to make it Louisiana <g>). This might mean that there were very few initial English settlers for St. Croix. So the germs of difference were in place: a former rural planet now more urbanized and largely "English," where slavery is not allowed; a former urban planet now decaying (houses are all old, population down), with French culture and slavery. I agree with you that the victors (aside from V.R.T., that is) were not a multinational space team. (Then again, come to think of it, "English" might mean "Anglophone" . . . but nah, let's keep this simple whenever possible.) Taken at face value, Roy T's Irish eyes and hair, and supposed "Frenchness by way of the Napoleonic Wars" is a reminder about how the ethno-national identities shift and blend over time; the Napoleonic being another case of French versus English (coalition forces that time); the Irish being a remnant of the Celts who used to own the whole region being fought over by the French and English. The loss of the records of the first French expedition, if it wasn't an accident of war, sure makes it look like the regime had something to hide from the new comers. This is my thinking at this time. =mantis=